We Are Born with the Right to Be Ordinary

The traditional mainstream values of Chinese society are an adherence to utilitarianism: education, income, property, position, titles, and other external conditions of money and power are used as the measure of a person's worth. The terrifying thing about this adherence is that it does not appear as explicit articles or doctrines, but as a mainstream value system that people take for granted while leaving unspoken.

Beneath the surface decoration of "benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness," the public in fact tacitly divides people into ranks and classes according to the aforementioned "snobbish, shallow, vulgar" standards, and uses them to decide whether, "by rights," they should fawn over, respect, remain neutral toward, ignore, or bully another person, as well as to what degree they should fawn or trample. Choosing one's attitude and calibrating its degree seems to be a social skill every Chinese person must master on the road to mental maturity. This is called "knowing how the world works."

The other side of this devotion to utilitarianism is the selling and amplification of failure anxiety. This anxiety has undoubtedly penetrated every corner of society and hangs over everyone's consciousness. For a people that values internal competition more than expansion, so-called success has never had much to do with liberating productive forces; it is not even entirely a zero-sum contest over limited resources. Rather, it is more like being able to surpass others under some consensual standard of value judgment. Only then does one have face, dignity, and a basis for stepping on the other side. That shared value may be exam scores, income figures, official rank, and so on.

Therefore, the happiness of Chinese people has always been built only on relative comparison. It is not common prosperity, nor a shared advance through blessings and hardships together; it is the sense of superiority that when others are starving, one has a bowl of sour thin porridge to drink, and when others can only drink sour thin porridge, one can eat coarse-flour steamed buns.

With this in mind, it is not hard to explain why, nowadays, those who blame themselves whenever they fail an exam (myself not excluded) are for the most part not truly distressed because their grades are so bad that they cannot attend university and may be unable to find work and support themselves in the future. Rather, their despair comes from having no path to a sense of superiority.

In fact, lacking a sense of superiority is not itself frightening. What is frightening is living in a society with no humanitarian spirit or sense of fairness, while also lacking that superiority. This means losing society's basic recognition of oneself, and then inevitably losing one's own sense of self-worth within. The same is true for students of No. 1 Middle School. If one takes the superiority of defeating classmates nearby as the yardstick of self-worth, then even if one enjoys the best educational resources in the city, absorbs the most refined knowledge of arts and sciences in human history, and has grades that 99% of the city's other students could only dream of, so what? Would that bring satisfaction? As long as one is at the bottom of the small group called a class, does one not still have only the obligation to be despised by classmates, and no right to look down on others? Conversely, in social life, it is precisely this pathological obsession with superiority, combined with a standard that measures superiority by the quantity of resources possessed, that drives people to frantically occupy resources they cannot use at all, simply to make the data of their social worth look respectable. The final result is severe inequality in resource distribution, with large numbers of people at the bottom barely scraping by while enduring contempt and humiliation.

What matters most for a person is to think clearly and live clearly. Toward absurd and distorted external mainstream values, one may behaviorally pinch one's nose and pretend to cooperate as if smelling a stench; but if one truly identifies with and believes in them from the bones and the bottom of the heart, that is indeed a kind of loss and poisoning. At such moments, those who blame themselves may appear on the surface to be resisting the world's absurd rules of comparison through self-examination and self-reflection. In reality, they are offering sacrifice to those rules through endless self-reproach. The rule tells the weak: if you cannot beat others, you should reflect! The weak say: fine, I will reflect right away! Is this not an expression of ultimate obedience to the rule?

People are meant to possess the right to be ordinary, and the right to accomplish nothing. To be a truly strong person does not necessarily mean being outstanding or obtaining some sense of superiority; it means remaining clear within, not being bewitched by external values, and not building the meaning of one's existence on outside recognition.

Perhaps many people will dismiss this, firmly believing that recognition from others is the starting point of one's own value. Others may exhaust their lives searching for meaning beyond "the evaluation of others," yet still regard it as an unattainably idealized state. In any case, even if one ultimately cannot find the value-world one longs for, and after repeated beatings from society is dragged back into the vast human sea, what one saw, felt, and gained along the way would still make this unruly and unrestrained life worthwhile, would it not?

From childhood to adulthood, elders always tell us to take fewer detours, as if smooth sailing were the purpose of effort. But I often think: after failure upon failure, to comprehend one's own unique life, is that not also another purpose of being tempered in the mortal world? As one member among the multitudes, we do not need to blindly despise utilitarians who pursue superiority, nor is there any need to resist in an extreme way the fact that we are about to become, or have already become, utilitarians ourselves. But we must give respect to those who are still holding fast to their original hearts and exploring the self. At the very least, they still refuse to submit to the rules that persecute them.